Seagate 3TB Backup Plus Desktop Drive Review

Seagate introduced the Backup Plus lineup last year that allowed users to backup content from and upload to their favourite social networks. We also reviewed the portable 1TB Backup Plus drive in September last year and found it a decent offering if you considered your social network data ‘save-worthy’.

Now we’re taking Seagate’s desktop offering for a spin that promises the same Backup Plus advantages with a humongous local storage of 3TB.

The portable Backup Plus drives max out at 1TB and this is where the Backup Plus Desktop drive steps in with more storage. The Backup Plus Desktop drive starts from 1TB storage and is available in four different SKUs up to 4TB.

Design-wise, the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop HDD features a glossy finish that attracts a decent amount of fingerprint smudges and vents placed on the side for dissipating heat from the drive. The bottom side of the drive is detachable that supports different interfaces.

One of the major differences between is a portable and a desktop drive is the power source – a portable one can be powered by a USB port whereas you’ll need an external power source to power the desktop drive. Seagate’s Backup Plus Desktop also needs to be powered up via an external source and comes with the requisite AC adapter.

On the performance front, the drive supports USB 3.0 out of the box that gives a read/write speed of around 110MB/s and 107MB/s respectively. However, if you feel USB 3.0 is ‘slow’ for your work, you can easily swap the USB 3.0 with a better and faster FireWire 800 and Thunderbolt support. FireWire 800 and Thunderbolt adapters can be bought separately.

Now that we’ve talked about the hardware performance, let’s talk about the software. This Seagate hard drive comes pre-loaded with Seagate Dashboard software and is essentially the only way to take advantage of the drive’s social networking features. The software supports Facebook, Flickr and YouTube social networks, which are admittedly the biggest ones but would’ve been better if Seagate added support for other social networking sites as well. For instance, Google+.

The software is really easy to use and allows to share content to social networks via the connected external hard drive, internal HDD or Seagate’s cloud service.

To wrap this up, the software is the only differentiator. If you’re planning to keep a backup of your data on social networking sites, this drive will make your life a lot easier. However, if local storage is the only thing you’re looking for, I would suggest you to look elsewhere as you might get a similar capacity external hard drive at a cheaper price.

It retails for around Rs. 8,000.

Rating:Pros: Storage, Easy backup and upload of content to social networksCons: Limited social network support

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